Rebellion in National Anti-Corruption Bureau

Gizo Uglava, the first deputy director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), has been dismissed. The disciplinary commission decided by a majority vote that he had exerted pressure on the detective who had exposed his involvement in leaking materials to the defendants and had violated a number of laws and ethical codes in his attempts to somehow influence the course of the legal case on leaks in the Great Construction project.

The NABU representatives voted for Uglava’s guilt, while the representatives of the Democratic Axe movement from the NABU Public Control Council were divided: one of them supported the verdict, they were in the minority, and an “indictment” eventually landed on the desk of the bureau’s director, Semen Kryvonos. Kryvonos could have chosen any punishment, from a warning to dismissal. However, to keep Uglava at work, even as a simple head of the department, is to leave a constant shadow of suspicion, so there was really no choice: on September 3, the first deputy was fired. But this is not the end of the story.

Uglava “bookmarked” the decision and reserved the right to appeal it in court. He filed a complaint with the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) about a conflict of interest in Kryvonos’ actions. He alleged that the director was biased and wanted to fire Uglava regardless of the results of the investigation. To corroborate his words, Uglava has a recording of his conversation with Kryvonos, which he made with his own recorder without any authorization. This conversation took place in June, after the Bigus.info story about how the NABU case file on the coordinator of the Great Construction, Yurii Holyk, was obtained by the defendant himself. At the time, Uglava and Kryvonos looked like accomplices. But then something happened.

According to some reports, some epiphany came to international structures, which until now considered Uglava a symbol and pillar of the NABU. The epiphany is understandable. If you are a symbol of NABU, and NABU has turned into a sieve through which everything flows to corrupt officials, who is to blame?

Moreover, in July and August, detectives conducted two major stories that did not involve the usual leaks to the Presidential Office.

The first was a suspicion of illicit enrichment against Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Antimonopoly Committee. Of course, the office was aware of the case itself, no one hid the fact that it had been opened after the journalistic investigation by the Schemes project. However, the detectives and the prosecutor took an unexpected step, catching Kyrylenko’s patrons in the Presidential Office unawares. They did not seek an expert opinion on the valuation of the defendant’s apartments, cars and land to calculate how much it all costs. Usually, such an appeal gives NABU’s opponents a chance to counter. For example, the Rotterdam+ case has been in court for several years now. But in the case of the Anti-Monopoly Committee, the investigation needed only the official price of the property that Kyrylenko and his relatives indicated in the sale and purchase agreements to see that he had acquired property bought with non-existent income worth much more than UAH 10 million. And this is exactly the threshold above which an official faces confiscation and prison. Therefore, the Prosecutor-General’s Office skipped this step of the investigation. And Oleh Tatarov’s lawyer is already making a mockery of Kyrylenko in court because of the version that he bought apartments worth tens of millions of hryvnias for money that his wife’s parents earned by selling raspberries from their garden at the market.

The second is the development of the story of Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko. First, the Security Service of Ukraine involved NABU in the case of Deputy Minister Oleksandr Heilo, who demanded a bribe from miners working at state-owned mines for the opportunity to transport equipment for the mines from Donetsk region to Volyn region. This is the same story when the Security Service announced that the deputy minister was detained with the help of Minister Halushchenko, although the minister learned about the detention ex post facto. Moreover, the detectives did not stop at the deputy minister and went on to search the minister himself. And again, no one from the leadership stopped them.

This stands in striking contrast with the picture we have seen in NABU recently. Such figures as the head of the National Bank, K. Shevchenko, and the State Property Fund, S. Sennichenko, safely fled long before the arrest warrant was issued. Deputy Head of the Prosecutor-General’s Office A. Smyrnov and the State Service for Special Communications Yu. Shchyhol resigned even before the announcement of suspicions. Former Construction Minister O. Chernyshov avoided searches after meeting with NABU Head S. Kryvonos.

And these are only the stellar participants of the hit parade. Can you imagine what NABU has become as a result of the long process of decomposition?

NABU’s medical history

The Bureau was not always like that. In 2015, after the Maidan revolution, more than a hundred motivated detectives were selected through a competition, and they soon began to yield results. It was the detectives of the “first convocation” who got to the current head of the Tax Service, R. Nasirov, the powerhouse of the People’s Front parliamentary faction, M. Martynenko, and the legal “fix-it man” of the then presidential Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction, O. Hranovskyi. The traditional anti-corruption bodies of post-Soviet Ukraine — the police, the Security Service, the Prosecutor-General’s Office — have never had access to figures of this level before.

People rejoiced at their success.

Americans clapped their hands at this advertisement for their investment in democracy.

The top corrupt officials were frustrated and put a spoke in the wheel: detectives had been fighting for the right to wiretap for years, and they still haven’t received an expert opinion that would be independent from the Presidential Office.

Meanwhile, the allied agencies were going through “hard times.” The “aquarium fish” in the office of the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), N. Kholodnytskyi, heard that he was leaking cases to the defendants. The head of the Prosecutor-General’s Office, Yurii Lutsenko, personally leaked to the public information about undercover NABU agents, and the Security Service detained them for “provoking a bribe to employees of the Ministry of Justice led by Pavlo Petrenko from the People’s Front party.” Later, Ivan Bakanov’s Security Service, Iryna Venediktova’s Prosecutor-General’s Office and Arsen Avakov’s National Police broke up the corruption case against Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Oleh Tatarov, who controlled all law enforcement agencies, except NABU.

This external pressure became one of the elements of tension in NABU. Over time, internal discomfort was added to it.

When the first head of NABU, Artem Sytnyk, resigned, some detectives were simply tired of chronic sabotage from the outside and inside.

It was obvious that their investigations were being flushed down the toilet. In many cases, detectives came to the searches and found the homes cleaned and messages from phones deleted. In addition, some millennials (yes, not all detectives are made of steel) were shocked by the harsh management methods of the head of the Main Detective Unit.

Thus, the environment of detectives was fractalized and some of them were demotivated. Meanwhile, the levers of real power were being gathered in the hands of the first deputy head of NABU, Gizo Uglava.

“Tristanovych” (the patronymic of Gizo Uglava, which became his nickname) joined NABU in 2015. His position as first deputy did not provide access to case files. However, appointments to administrative positions depended on him. (To find out how Uglava hacked NABU from within, see the article Who Manages Detectives in the New NABU Structure and What's Wrong with That?). Therefore, many people had informal relations with him. Now, during the disciplinary investigation into Uglava’s doings, it has become clear that various malicious viruses have infiltrated the Internal Investigation Department and the undercover detectives unit.

Even before the competition for the head of NABU, I heard a version that Uglava had entered into a tacit pact with Andrii Yermak that, without interference of the Presidential Office, he would make sure that the winner of the competition was some weak figure who would be managed by an experienced player.

The reasonable question “Why didn’t Uglava run for office himself and sell legal cases to himself as he pleases?” has a simple answer. He really still hasn’t learned the Ukrainian language, which prevents him from passing any competition for a public office. The position of the NABU deputy director is not elected or subject to competition, and it has no term of office. In fact, Uglava already holds the record among Ukraine’s top officials for the longest tenure in office: almost ten years.

Despite the fact that the detectives had already taken a swing at Tatarov and were following Yurii Holyk around with his Great Construction under the roof of the Presidential Office, it was impossible to brazenly interfere in the competition for the head of NABU, as the bureau remained a sacred cow for the Americans. So, the task was not trivial.

Further events unfolded as follows. Semen Kryvonos, a member of Saakashvili’s squad, applied for the competition. He was in charge of some customs issues in the team of the head of the Odesa Regional State Administration (does anyone else remember Saakashvili being there?). He then became the head of the Office of Simple Solutions and from there moved to the State Inspectorate of Architecture and Urban Planning. Kryvonos did not acquire a significant corruption track record here because it was very difficult to accuse him of selectivity of his employees in conducting — or not conducting — inspections of some construction sites.

The selection committee for the post of NABU director was composed of half internationals and half Ukrainians. Although it was formally headed by Ukrainian Mykola Kucheriavenko, the informal leader was a foreign expert, Drago Kos, who worked for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He voted for Kryvonos, although not all the international members voted for this candidate. For example, former FBI agent Karen Greenaway was against him.

However, Kos was in favor of Kryvonos, and he was eventually appointed director of NABU. In turn, Saakashvili said that “all attempts to derail his candidacy were eliminated thanks to Andrii Yermak and Oleksii Chernyshov” (the aforementioned minister who escaped the searches). The journalists also also discovered that Kryvonos’s wife worked with Yermak’s deputy, Oleksii Kuleba, who is now the current curator of regional (and sometimes construction) policy at the Presidential Office.

Then it was a technical matter for the experienced Uglava to take the customs and construction newcomer under his wing. The communications specialist Polina Lysenko, a good friend of Uglava’s who had communicated with the OECD and other international organizations, was scandalously appointed deputy director of NABU.

For many detectives, this was a trigger.

Some of them soon quit, realizing the lack of prospects in this Bureau’s design.

Andrii Kaluzhynskyi and several other well-known detectives were actually forced to resign due to an investigation by the NABU’s Internal Control Department. It is headed by Roman Osypchuk, who was one of Kryvonos’s two “competitors” among the final three candidates in the competition for NABU directorship.

After that, a scandal erupted: one of NABU detectives filed a statement with the SAPO about signs that the materials of the Great Construction investigation were being leaked at the highest level. It turned out that the advisor to the Presidential Office, Heorhii Birkadze, had sent the coordinator of the Great Construction, Yurii Holyk, information about the NABU investigation into the latter’s activities.

Mathematically speaking, Gizo Uglava was the best fit for the definition of someone who could have leaked data to Birkadze, and not only to him. The insider had to have worked in a top position at NABU for a long time because the leaks took place under both the old and new directors of the bureau.

After the detective’s statement, cameras, billboards and people’s attention invaded the NABU’s sleepy realm. Investigations by parliamentarians and critical publications in the media began. At the same time, SAPO launched its investigations into other cases in the bureau. Uglava started making mistakes.

At first, he allegedly hinted to the Prosecutor-General’s Office that he would blackmail them by leaking some data if they did not stand up for him — which he later did by recording his conversation with Kryvonos. Uglava claimed that he was innocent and that he just needed to get out of this story with a clean reputation so that he could find a job with decent employers. And Kryvonos explained to him that with the scale of the information published in the media, this was no longer possible.

At that time, an investigation by ZN.UA and Bigus.info on the leaks of information about the NABU case to Holik was made public, as was the story by Mykhailo Tkach in Ukrainska Pravda about Kryvonos’ involvement in sabotaging the NABU case regarding Oleksii Chernyshov’s possible involvement in a shady land and construction deal.

A printout of this conversation between Uglava and Kryvonos was sent to Ukraine’s foreign partners a few days ago. Uglava also gave the audio recording to members of the Disciplinary Commission, which was considering his involvement in leaking information to the defendants. He eventually passed it to the NACP to open a case against Kryvonos. And the NACP has recently been headed by another former NABU detective, Pavlushchyk, who also worked with Uglava. He was enthusiastic about the statement of his former boss and opened the proceedings. If a certain decision is made, it will allow Uglava to appeal Kryvonos’s decision to dismiss him in court. And if the court also receives an instruction from the Presidential Office to satisfy the complainant, Uglava will return to his position.

Then we will all have to wonder what we have witnessed. Either Kryvonos really tried to stay on the bright side of history or he was just a pawn on the dark side.

The worst part is that this will remain a puzzle for the Americans. For many years, they considered Uglava to be a person who ensures the proper functioning of NABU. Recently, however, they have received a lot of information about the downside of the deputy director’s work. Now Americans realize that the issue of Uglava is not about the viability of the symbol of reforms in Ukraine. This is just a routine repair of one position and several other departments inside NABU, where mold has grown in the corners. In other words, it is not an encroachment on the institution, but only a matter of small changes to level the situation.